February 26, 2006

Supreme Dereliction of Command Pt. I

By DHinMI

Yesterday over at Daily Kos, our friend and
frequent commenter emptypockets had a powerful diary chronicling
George W. Bush's Thursday. As Iraq teetered on the verge of all-out
sectarian/civil war, and the families of seven U.S. soldiers were
notified that their sons made the supreme sacrifice for their
country, our Commander in Chief couldn't didn't even attempt to
exercise exemplary supreme command. While Iraq's religious leaders
tried to keep their followers from committing violence against
members of other sects, tribes or ethnic groups, Bush attended
political fundraising events.

One might think it wasn't supposed to
have turned out this way. Back in 2002, while the neocons ramped up
the Iraq war propaganda, the White House made it known that Bush was
supposedly reading Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and
Leadership in Wartime by neocon scholar Eliot Cohen. Most of the
neocons dilettantes in empirical scholarship, but Cohen is generally
considered a serious scholar. In his book, he investigated the
wartime leadership of four civilian politicians: Abraham Lincoln,
French Premiere George Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben
Gurian. In addition to their propensity for dialouge with military
leaders instead of dictating orders, Cohen identified four common
traits:

A tremendous amount of common sense. Secondly, they're willing to
ask questions about absolutely everything. And they understood that
there could be very fine grain matters of detail which, in fact,
would be of much larger importance. And finally, they were all great
communicators. They knew how to talk to their people, to their
parliaments, and of course to their military.

Cohen also believed that these four leaders encouraged candor.

There's one story, which I talk about in the book, where the head
of the royal air force found himself at one point yelling at
Churchill. Then he suddenly realized what he was doing, and he
stopped and apologized. And Churchill glared at him, and said, "in
war, you don't have to be nice, you just have to be right."

One could hope that Bush read Supreme Command and learned from it,
because it is obvious he did not enter office possessing these skills
and habits of thinking and interaction.

Of course, not every nation enters a war with a leader of the
caliber of Lincoln or Ben Gurian. In those cases where a leader
isn't exemplary,

...the basic ideas still apply, because what you're asking of a
political leader is to be serious about war, to be... to take
responsibility for all of it, and to apply themselves. As I tried to
point out earlier on, the thing that's really so impressive about an
Abraham Lincoln, for example, is the enormous amount of common
sense. Abraham Lincoln had no background in military affairs. He
served for about a month in an Indian campaign, in which he didn't
even hear a shot fired in anger. But what he was great at was just
asking the very basic questions. "What are we trying to do?"
"How are we going to do it?" And I think it's that kind of
relentless common sense that we can look for even in an average
political leader today...it seems to me the nature of war itself
requires that a political leader, if they're going to do even an
adequate job, has to be on top of it. And they have to apply
themselves. And they have to treat what is, after all, the most
serious thing a state can do in a serious way.

As emptypockets showed, Bush certainly isn't treating the
situation in Iraq with the seriousness it requires. Even in the
“most serious thing a state can do,” the Bush administration is
more interested in posturing and marketing than in substance. Thus,
instead of learning from and exemplifying the lessons of Cohen's
book, it's obvious Cohen's book was simply a prop employed to present
Bush as a serious leader. All that mattered was to send the message
that the generals and State Department experts would be pushed aside,
and the chickenhawks in the administration would show the "playground
bullies who's the boss." (“Take THAT, Eric Shinseki, with your
loser predictions that it would take over half a million troops to
occupy Iraq!”) Unlike Cohen's somewhat “ideal type” wartime leaders,
the Bush aparatchiki resorted to their dominant modes of engaging the
world: Bureaucratic warfare for the winning but not as measured by
any material results on outcomes (just financial inputs), or the graduate-level
colloquium, where rhetoric and sophistry can often prevail over
pragmatic truth and results measured by empirical results.

[A] pundit should not recommend a policy
without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute
it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the
civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV"
-- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the
"real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of
Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul
Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military
leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and
committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks,
and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I
did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie
schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's
borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the
under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned
Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big
construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations,
rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered
young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

I did not know, but I might have guessed...

There is a lot of talk these days about
shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor
should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders'
chief concern. If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it
won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders
and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at
home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a
strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in
detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they
need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder,
although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father
in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth -- an end to
happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of
the men and women our country sends into the fight.

I can only speculate on what Eliot
Cohen thinks about George W. Bush packing his day full of political
fundraising events while Iraq possibly plunges into sectarian war.
But I cannot be convinced that George W. Bush is leading our country
with a “seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country
sends into the fight.”

We're living during historic times. I wish I could report to you that the war on terror was over, but it's not. It's -- these are serious times that require serious thought and serious purpose in order to do our most important duty, which is to protect the American people.

One could quibble whether his own words that afternoon were suited to a wartime President:

I know there's some students listening to this speech -- one, I'll try to keep it short so you can get back to class. (Laughter.)...

You know, my buddies in Texas, they come up to the White House quite frequently. And after they get over their initial shock that I'm there -- (laughter) -- they then ask me,...

I've probably been going on a little too long. I hope the food's not getting cold. (Laughter.)

It's important never to send mixed signals to our troops in combat. It's important not to play politics with the issue of war and peace.

Now, my question is simple. Going out fundraising in a week when you've cut veterans benefits so much that the Air Force Association calls you out for driving 200,000 veterans out of VA health care --- is that more "sending mixed signals," or "play[ing] politics"?